A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts
Buckley, William F. Jr.
A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts William F.Buckley, Jr. / G. P. Putnam's Sons / $12.95 John Chamberlain The new Buckley collection (A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts), which includes more than a...
...To understand our hopes for a young successor, one has to realize the pariah nature of conservatism in the early fifties...
...How did he do it...
...Willi, a genius in his ability to project publications, had a truly insatiable need to edit a magazine all of his very own...
...G. P. Putnam's Sons / $12.95 John Chamberlain The new Buckley collection (A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts), which includes more than a hundred columns written in the mid-seventies and some longer autobiographical pieces, would have enchanted the Max Beerbohm who drew those wonderful cartoons of the Old Self and the Young Self...
...Jimmy Carter's "coherence" consists of defining human rights in Rhodesia as the "transfer of power from an orderly white community to a disorderly faction within the black community...
...When I left Life magazine to work for the Freeman, my old friend Edward Klauber, who had been my night city editor at the New York Times, agitatedly begged me to consult a psychiatrist...
...The result was some painful intraoffice tension, and Willi, who lacked patience, broke before any of the others...
...Willi failed to see the humor of the remark...
...If cynicism had corrupted his virtues he would not be capable of the moral outrage he expresses at Lillian Hellman's unwillingness to concede that Whittaker Chambers behaved more honorably in the "scoundrel time" of the 1950s than the Hollywood Ten, who asked only of their country that it respect their right to tell lies...
...To my own considerable amazement, Buckley has credited me with changing the course of his life by writing an introduction to his original God and Man at Yale...
...The Young Self appears retrospectively, in the startling recollections of the Buckley adventures in flying an ancient crate as a Yale undergraduate (he soloed without permission) and in the fresh introduction that a ruminative Buckley has written for a reissue of his first book, God and Man at Yale...
...Nor in well-saying...
...The astounding thing is that in a quarter-century of commentary on a fetid scene Buckley has not grown weary in well-doing...
...Buckley has always been given to generous gestures and has always been pleasant in his personal relations...
...When Saigon surrendered to Hanoi, Buckley put the whole business into moral perspective by concluding that the North Vietnamese "did indeed fight as bravely and tenaciously as Hitler's soldiers...
...Henry Hazlitt...
...I don't believe that he has the least desire to be an ideo logue-indeed, his one word of reproof for his friend and early mentor Frank Chodorov is that he turned his anti-statism around and around on a single spit...
...And when certain people complained that the South Vietnamese ran at the end, Buckley observed that they at least "ran under the pressure of Russian tanks," whereas our Congress "ran under the pressure of moral fatigue...
...The only trouble was that he had misread Buckley's character...
...We should have waited until we had a friend in office in Panama before making a sensible deal for shared control of a waterway that is still strategic...
...The introduction is included here on the theory that only those who are interested in historical curios have John Chamberlain, a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of Farewell to Reform and many other books...
...The implication is that if I had not acted out of "reckless generosity" (his phrase) and stood sponsor for him in 1951, he would never have become a public figure...
...If that is ideol ogy, Murray Kempton is right...
...After all, nobody died at Watergate, but Mao, on a conservative estimate, brought death to 30 million of his countrymen...
...If left to his own preferences, Buckley would spend his time sailing in summer, skiing in winter, and writing James Bondish whodunits and adventure chronicles for his pin money...
...The truth is that I, along with Henry Hazlitt and Suzanne La Follette and Frank Chodorov, had a shrewd idea that Buckley was a good bet to do marvelous things for the conservative movement...
...As in a Beerbohm cartoon, the Old Self grows logically out of the Young Self...
...All that he asks of the world-and this is what keeps his publicist's adrenaline flow ing-is that it should manage to return to a sense of order rooted in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount...
...What touched me about Buckley's "R.I.P...
...And when he received the word that he was free to assemble a staff for National Weekly, he thought he had it made at last...
...The answer is obvious when one compares the prose style of his collected columns and articles in A Hymnal with the writing in God and Man at Yale...
...Garet Gar-rett?-would have gladly volunteered to do it...
...My difficulty in L'affaire Schlamm was that I thought Buckley was right in following the dictates of his own take-charge nature, yet, as one of Willi's oldest American friends, I had to hold a dismayed man's hand...
...He was not alone in thinking us a bunch of loonies...
...Of course, neither Willi nor I had anything of a truly definitive nature to do with the development of Buckley as publicist, master of elegant letters, or magazine editor...
...The cynic would see nothing strange in Richard Nixon's obsequiousness toward Mao on that great trip to China, but Buckley, characteristically, finds such behavior reprehensible while he is willing to forgive the crimes of the Watergate cover-up...
...None of the suaviter in modo aspects of his character, however, has ever caused a diminuendo of his fortiter in re attitude toward such monsters of the political scene as Lenin, Mao, Brezhnev, and Pol Pot...
...And when Willi Schlamm died last fall, Buckley had the infinite grace to say that Willi had started National Review, the implication being that there would have been no magazine without him...
...He, more than anyone else, has made conservatism a respectable force...
...What we saw in Buckley was a young man with the insouciance, the faith, the public presence, and above all the wit, to carry on a fight that would ultimately redeem the conservative and libertarian movements from their pariah status...
...Felix Morley...
...What other editor would treat his entire staff to a tour of Russia unrelated to the articles that might result from it...
...In his latter-day excess of generosity he has remarked that I had tried to invert the true order of benefactions by thanking him for the privilege of letting me introduce God and Man at Yale when it was I who was doing him the favor...
...Sometimes Buckley is wrong-he missed the point about the Panama Canal when he failed to consider that, in letting a pro-Castroite dictator take it away from us, we were made to seem soft in the eyes of the world...
...His association with National Review dates from that magazine's earliest days...
...for Willi Schlamm was his willingness to forget a peculiarly painful period in the history of National Review...
...I was like a father to him," said Willi of Buckley...
...How do you deal with a man who, day in and day out, in his magazine, in his TV productions, and in his columns, articles, and books, can always summon up the juxtaposition that makes the liberal position seem absurd...
...He has always had a natural courtesy...
...His way of dealing with the homosexual sex scenes that have become obligatory in magazine-rack novels is simply to say that they suddenly inspire "lustful thoughts about Anita Bryant...
...He had been staked in the late forties by Henry Luce to start a literary monthly called Measure, and had assembled some 50 good articles for it, when the threat of financial depression and the onset of the Korean war closed it down...
...In working for the Freeman Willi never missed an opportunity to take on greater responsibility...
...In his generosity Buckley, who was always willing to turn his home over to Young Americans organizing for Freedom, has grown positively lavish with the years...
...But logic has never been enough to make an idea appealing to our reading or TV public...
...The point in bringing all this up is that Buckley was in full control of his own career even before his graduation from Yale...
...The Old Self Buckley is the many-faceted commentator on everything under the sun, from Betty Ford's recommendation of a reclining posture for unmarried young American women to the aftermath of Watergate...
...Knowing that Willi came from the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, I asked him why he should be so surprised at the "son's" behavior...
...At the point in his career when he stopped writing exclusively about campus affairs, Buckley started to cultivate a style that would never allow a liberal or any other type of sinner to seem anything but ridiculous...
...Nor did he see that Buckley could have owed equal loyalty to Burnham and Kendall, who had their own "fatherly" qualities, too...
...And while Willi Schlamm, after the failure of the Freeman as a biweekly journal of opinion, did persuade Buckley to take the responsibility for a publication that was originally called National Weekly, it happens that Buckley had been considering a magazine career on his own...
...The point is that we shouldn't have let the Canal go under duress...
...The sentences in Gamay are good workaday sentences, clear in their insistence that a spade is a spade and a collectivist a collectivist...
...In justice to Buckley I am sure that, in the back of his mind, he considered the Canal a lost cause simply because we still elect Presidents and legislators who would never consent to send our Marines anywhere, no matter what the provocation...
...Buckley wanted to run his own shop, taking advice from Willi, or from James Burnham, or from Will-moore Kendall, as the situation might decree...
...My Latin is used advisably: Buckley would have made a very good Roman citizen of the great days, wary of Carthage and strenuously concerned for the perpetuation of good republican institutions...
...So it should be understandable that I considered it a favor on Buckley's part to be allowed to do him a favor...
...But the reason why Buckley is never a bore is that he never turns anything around and around on a spit...
...Murray Kempton has said that Buckley has "always tried to be an ideologue and yet never managed to be a bore...
...He went back to Europe where, eventually, he did manage to start his own quite remarkable journal, Zeitbuhne...
...bought or seen the recent Regnery re-publication of the work that made Buckley notorious in the process of becoming famous...
...If I had not done the introduction to Gamay (the acronym for God and Man at Yale), somebody else-Max Eastman...
...We at the Freeman had watched him and had tagged him, along with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, as someone who was going to be important...
...Buckley sticks in the knife by saying that, if he were forced to fight for his life, he would prefer to do so "in the company of fifteen South Vietnamese soldiers, than of the fifteen members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
